Inside and Outside the Art Institution: Self-Valorisation and Montage in Contemporary Art

Translated by Nuria Rodríguez, supervised by Aileen Derieg

Marcelo Expósito

This text was written on
October 1st 2006 as a broad and immediate response (hence, its “informal”
style) to a short questionnaire posed by a Spanish digital magazine on
contemporary art and critical theory. It was not published; it is reproduced
here almost unaltered. The original questions have been replaced by epigraphs
describing the subject matter that the different sections dealt with.

The title of this text
paraphrases an important essay by the German-American art historian Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh: "Allegorical
Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art". Written in
1982, Buchloh's influential essay sought to provide an explicitly political
and historically grounded approach
(going back to particular instances of politicisation in the classic
avant-garde movements, such as John Heartfield's photomontage) to specific
practices that, beginning in the late seventies but more emphatically during
the eighties, opposed the hegemony of the market within the arts institution—with
its emphasis on strong notions of “work” and “artist”—through methodologies
like the appropriation of images and the reinvention of montage. The (not quite
fully-developed) hypothesis underlying my text is that the procedures analysed
by Buchloh were neutralized by the new hegemonies at the heart of the arts
institution, which were, however, integrated into (or are in a sense the
starting point for) the new forms of “unbounded” politicisation of artistic
practice that have been taking place in synchrony with the laborious production
of a new cycle of struggles, which
originated in the late eighties and has
filled the past decade with a series of explosions.

Another aspect of my
hypothesis, which also needs to be developed, suggests that the certain exhaustion
of those same critical practices of appropriation and montage that Buchloh’s essay
tried to endow with critical and political meaning was precisely due to their
“confinement” within the margins of the arts institution, and the central
importance they continued to give the very institution that they criticised
because of its role as virtually the only space of legitimisation and
valorisation. Some new forms of politicisation of artistic practices based
themselves on the assumptions
established by these earlier critical practices, putting into practice
various kinds of “going beyond”, as
well as going “in and out” of the
institution and using other processes that deny, displace or relativise the
arts institution’s centrality as a space for valorisation and legitimisation.
As explained below, it seems appropriate to apply the Operaist notion of
“self-valorisation” of labour to these processes.

A critique of the
traditional division of artistic labour

I don't know whether I can say anything new on this subject, because to
me, the situation seems quite clear: this division was breached a long time ago
and we’ve moved beyond it, although it probably continues to hold a
contradictory symbolic and political hegemony in the art field. Part of my
training took place in Spain’s independent video movement of the eighties and
nineties, in which traditional role hierarchies were almost totally broken
down. It was perfectly normal for activities like writing, criticism, the
organising of activities, editing and publishing, the creation and distribution
of works and so on to be carried out by those who made up the network. This
shouldn’t necessarily be attributed to an unusually high level of political
awareness. It can probably be partly explained by the fact that, at the time,
video was developing on the fringes of the art institution, and we know that
there have been similar experiences of hierarchies being dismantled and roles
shared or interchanged on the “periphery” of the institution at various times
and places in history, not just in the recent past. It could be said that the
breakdown of this “traditional” division of labour is deeply rooted in the
tradition of the avant-garde movements, and it is therefore, from certain
points of view, quite “traditional” itself.

So I’m not really sure that practices which avoid falling into this
particular division of labour can automatically
be considered, as is sometimes tritely claimed, a “negation” of a traditional
model or a search for “new” or “other” paradigms. Rather, I think that at their
best, they show their own strength, they enjoy their own ontological
consistency when they are rooted in history, so they can’t always be
interpreted in terms of their “alternative nature” in relation to the
“traditional” model. It was a long time ago now that I stopped seeing my own
work in terms of putting forth an “alternative” to a “central” model, and
started seeing it instead as a form of positivity, an exploration of
independently consistent ways of working.

I began by describing the symbolic and political hegemony of a
particular division of labour in the art field as contradictory because the vague “artist-entrepreneur” model has
become so widespread that it has burst its banks. In the cultural and the art
field, labour now perfectly matches the “communicative” labour paradigm that is
at the centre of the post-fordist mode of production, but division of labour still has a symbolic hegemony and is upheld by economic and
institutional interests. Today, the work of cultural producers is de facto essentially communicative,
linguistic and semiotic. It fundamentally involves the production, through
language, of processes that are usually exploited by institutions when they
valorise them exclusively at the
moment that they materialise as objects or events that are profitable in
economic, political and/or symbolic terms. The way I see it, the key to the
contradiction lies in the fact that upholding one particular division of labour
is no longer “natural” – it isn’t an inherent aspect of today’s most highly
developed forms of cultural production or most of its major trends: all it does
is support that particular way of
valorising artistic labour – the moment of crystallisation into marketable
objects or certain kinds of events.

When the decision is taken to valorise artistic labour under different forms,
in different places and times, through other processes, and, above all, to self-valorise artistic labour, this
doesn’t really mean negating or criticising a certain model of the division of
labour: it means that the instituted model simply loses its relevance.

That said, it is important to add that although within the art
institution there is a growing acceptance of a particular, vague “artist-manager”
model (a slippery term, right? We could also add the ideas of the
artist-entrepreneur, curator-artist and artist-“businessman”, just as Lazzarato
speaks somewhat provocatively of the post-Fordist worker as an entrepreneur or “businessman”...),
this doesn’t necessarily entail a
critical or alternative practice, nor one that moves towards self-valorisation.
It did, to a large extent, thirty years ago, during the 68-cycle with its mood
of widespread criticism of social institutions, just as it did with the
explosive meeting of politics and the avant-garde in the period between the
wars. Today it is an ambiguous model (just look at how different “relational”
artists and curators work). The way in which a “traditional” function of
artistic labour is currently being blurred corresponds, almost blow by blow, to
the forms of the “flexibilisation” of labour in the context of production in
more general terms. Just as in renewed capitalism overall, the “flexibility” of
artistic or cultural labour is profoundly ambivalent from the start. But the
process is irreversible: we have no choice but to work within this contemporary
condition.

Artistic “work” and
“non-artistic” work: on the “artisticness” of art labour

The distinction that is sometimes made in the work of certain artists (I
count myself among them) between labour that is “not strictly” “artistic”, and
that which “explicitly” is, corresponds to a hierarchical taxonomy based on the
primacy of a somewhat old-fashioned idea of what an “art work” is. Near the end
of his life, Lissitzky claimed that he considered the pavilions he had designed
for the Bolshevik government in the early stages of the Soviet Union to be his
most important art work. The historiographic distinctions that are usually made
between “artistic work”, “design” and “works for the State apparatus” in order
to taxonomize Lissitzky’s career, are clearly an aggression against the nature
of his practice. I think it would be much more useful to take his own statement
seriously and ask ourselves: but where the hell is the “art work” in his
pavilions?

In historical terms, for many years I have considered names like
Lissitzky, Klucis, Heartfield, Renau or the Benjamin of the “reproducible work
of art” and the author as producer to be the
foundational paradigm (precisely because they are neither “unique” nor
isolated) of a particular way of surpassing a pre-existing traditional model.
They marked an opening up to a type of practices that didn’t start from scratch
in any sense, but marked the start of forms that no longer “negate” other,
predominant models, but organise their own coherence, their own positivity. A
pavilion designed by Lissitzky is a collective project that includes
multidisciplinary dynamics, and contains “art works” and other things that
don't strictly qualify as such, as well as an infinite number of “in-between”
elements. It’s a work based on co-operative principles and the sharing of many
different kinds of skills. And it radically assumes two characteristics that
strongly challenged the then-traditional model in order to leave it behind: its
useful nature and its communicative dimension. When almost a
century ago avant-garde art had to openly question its political function and
face its communicative dimension, no longer questioning them in terms of
content but rather incorporating them structurally,
I think it marked the start of what we are now, or what we may still become.

(Incidentally, one of the artists whom I’ve most admired, Ulises
Carrión, worked without rest and didn’t produce much legible “art work”. His
practice largely consisted of interventions in the dominant communicative
processes, or in producing others,
constantly shifting the form and the moment of (self-) valorisation, always
changing. Interrupting communication channels, producing alternative
communication and weaving together organisation and networks – this was his
labour.)

I think that in historical terms, certain avant-garde movements can
teach us two things: firstly, that there can be “art” without “art works”
(Godard used to say that cinema is one thing and films are another, and films
often don’t have anything to do with cinema: thus the history of cinema should
be rigorously differentiated from the more usual history of films and
directors. For some time now I’ve wondered: How can you write a history of art “without
art works”, or where the usual notion of an art work is radically de-centred?);
secondly, that it is possible to make a kind of art “that doesn’t appear to be
so” (as soon as one looks outside the European scene and the “classic”
avant-garde movements, the examples increase exponentially). I don’t think that
the first lesson leads us necessarily to hackneyed academic chattering on the
dematerialisation of the object. Rather, it leads to the radical change of
mentality that occurs at specific moments in history in which the valorisation of artistic labour comes
into focus as a relevant political problem, together with the definition of
what “new” forms, as a result, this labour has to take on in order to achieve
self-valorisation. The second lesson refers us to the contingency statute that
characterises artistic labour, which doesn’t always have to give primary
importance to being recognised as such in accordance with the primacy of
current legibility criteria sanctioned by the corresponding institutional
fields (the legibility criteria that determine an “art work’s” artistic status,
which we now know to be contingent and which are themselves historical, in no
way absolute and essential; in no way disinterested. In this sense, it’s
advisable to always keep in mind, for example, the lessons of feminist readings
of the history of art and feminist film theory), in particular when the
formalisation of the work or its processes shift
outside a particular institutional field, or flow in and out of it. In this
latter case, it’s particularly important to be aware that the “artisticness” of
work is not an identity or an essential or pre-existing condition: it is a
contingency that can correspond to tactical or political functions, and its
sanctioning as an “art work” has to be disputed and challenged in discursive
and material terms against the institution’s “common sense” through conflict
and negotiation. This is why I think it is essential to practice writing and
criticism, which shouldn’t be understood as the occupation of those who emit
inspired opinions, but as the field in which legitimacy criteria and the
valorisation of practices are negotiated through conflict. (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0806/butler/en)

Montage

In my opinion, the most momentous innovation that the artistic
avant-garde movements contributed to 20th Century culture and politics simultaneously, is montage. I’m not referring to
montage as a stylistic exercise that folds in on itself, but the kind that,
whether in Tucumán Arde, Heiner Müller or Alexander Kluge, constitutes a tool
for thinking – for critical thinking. In this sense, montage brings
heterogeneous things together into a fragmented whole that highlights its structural discontinuity, shattering the illusion of
self-consistency and unity of both form and discourse, without relinquishing the production of meaning as a result. This
convergence of a diversity of things deserves to be conceived as a part of a whole that in itself points elsewhere. I marvel at how much this invention can continue
to contribute to the construction of forms and
discursive practice at the same time.

I’ve always considered my incursions into editorial activities, for
example, to be either fully or partly artistic projects. At least to some
extent, the publishing projects I’ve participated in usually consist of taking
elements that are at different stages of materialisation and diffusion within
larger networks or flows —which we consider ourselves part of— , catalysing
through reorganising. In very simple terms, the editorial process becomes a
montage technique that discontinuously articulates a discourse that then enters
into circulation once more. Inversely, I’m increasingly less likely to describe
the “artistic” research, teaching or curatorial projects that I’ve generally
worked on as hybrids or interdisciplinary projects. Instead, I see them as suspended between the categories of art,
criticism and editing; technically, they almost always consist of small
exercises in construction and montage.

In short, I think that the usual distinctions that separate what some of
us do into actual “art works” and “secondary” work (criticism, editing,
writing...) is inappropriate when it comes to considering what needs to be
done, because I believe, above all, in the labour of construction and montage
that occasionally produces “things” that can’t necessarily be read as “art
works”. I’ve always felt suspicious of the ongoing presence of the surrealist
object in certain kinds of contemporary art, as well as the way in which
dominant conceptualism and its effects managed to reintroduce the fetishism of
“form” through the back door. I only have a little faith left in Dada now,
whereas I’m still a believer in constructivism and productivism, modern
political documentary and montage cinema. Almost all of the art that I still
continue to learn from consists in constructing, (re)structuring, combining and
putting together, in order to produce artefacts whose legibility is ambivalent, always site- and
time-specific.

The artist as “multifaceted” worker.
Contradiction, adaptation and complicity with the institutional medium

It may be interesting to pause for a moment
and consider this strange adjective, “multifaceted”. The history of modern
Western art needed to create a narrative that would include, and thus “normalise”,
the ruptures caused by some of the avant-garde movements, so it captured Soviet
art, for example, articulated its (re)presentation by organising it into a
narrative that separated biographical lines into pieces that made up a “plural”
movement, and created a narrative for each of those separate and more or less
isolated lines in turn, based on an organisation that classified their “art
works” into different styles and formats. This taxonomy and juxtaposition
produced the effect of simultaneity in
the way artists used techniques, languages and media. At moments like this, the
history of 20th century art constructs the myth of the modern, “multifaceted”
artist. Rodchenko and Stepanova never set out to be multifaceted artists. Their
“multifacetedness” is an effect of the way in which the history of modern art
recovers the ruptures that these artists represent by incorporating them into a
normalised narrative in which conflict has been tamed. Their work isn’t
multifaceted: if anything, it is conflictive.

In terms of work in general, today’s workers
aren’t “multifaceted”: they are multi-exploited, or rather, subject to a regime
of flexible exploitation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity). It would be amusing
to switch the concepts and consider how the illusion of the “multifacetedness”
that is now being required of workers in order to make the new form of
capitalist control of the workforce more bearable is similar to the kind of
flexible exploitation that Tatlin or Popova are subjected to by the history of
modern art in order to extract some kind of cultural added value that fuels its
existence and in return distorts the nature of the original, simultaneously
artistic and political, experience.

The other term that I find curious is “complicity”. I appreciate the
clarity with which it is stated, but it is based on a way of framing the issue
that I find inoperative: What should one declare oneself, sitting on the bench
of the accused? Guilty, innocent of acting in collusion or complicity with an
institutional system? (I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not in this in
order to submit myself to a political trial or to earn myself a place in
heaven). If the idea is to question whether “critical” positions “genuinely”
question the state of things or, on the contrary, help to reproduce it, I think
a very simplified answer would be: both. But this does not go far enough.

In this order of things, labour in art is no different to the way in
which post-Fordist labour in general oscillates between self-valorisation and
control (subjugation), and it’s often paradoxical because it operates under the
conditions of autonomy and subjection simultaneously.
For much of last century, artistic and cultural labour was an “extraordinary”
social activity – outside of the ordinary, exceptional. Today, the
characteristics that have traditionally defined it (deregulated activity not
subject to the same discipline as “industrial work”, with an emphasis on the
value of self expression, giving maximum importance to subjectivity...) are
increasingly becoming the paradigm for the core forms of labour in renewed
capitalism.

In my generation, those of us who started off doing artistic work before
political work, only gradually became aware of how our activities functioned
within the arts. At the beginning, we didn’t have the slightest idea that the
flexible exploitation system we were subject to was intensive but discontinuous.
Its discontinuous nature is precisely the key that makes sustainable
exploitation possible. If your work is “at the disposal” of an institution in a
continuous, regulated way, you immediately consider entering a standard “labour
for wages” relationship. If your work is at the institution’s “disposal” in a
discontinuous, deregulated way, then the relationship will be based on casual “labour
for income (honorarium)” terms. Discontinuous income, rather than a continuous
wage, is what you get paid circumstantially for “rendering services” on a
casual basis; in this case, the rest of the time is “yours”. But the work of
self-education, training or testing, preparation, production and so on that is
carried out in the periods when your relationship to the institution is “inactive”
is time that you use for producing, for the rendering “of services”, without remuneration. Thus the
exploitation of artistic labour is intensive,because it is exercised in the overall
time that you commit to your work, but the key to its economical sustainability
for the institution resides in the fact that it is formalised discontinuously: you only get paid for
the specific project, exhibition or investigation or the number of hours “you
work”. The extent to which this kind of exploitation is widely accepted in the
arts is because, obviously, your activity is presumably “gratifying” in terms
of vocational self-expression and freedom. Also because your subjection to the
institution is irregular in terms of labour-income, but constant in symbolic terms and in
its forms of subjectivisation: the artist is taught to always turn to the institution as a guarantee of legitimacy and,
above all, the “relevance” of his or her own activity.

There was an inescapable structural contradiction for those of us who
started to think about the politicisation of our art practice without breaking out of the vicious
circle of its valorisation predominantly
within the institution. The currents
of thought based on a critique of institutions and certain forms of public and
critical art, and some critical theory of the visual representations that
fuelled us from the eighties until part of the nineties were like manna from
heaven in the middle of the desert of the postmodern cultural counterrevolution
(as Virno calls it). Nonetheless, it was becoming increasingly clear that
critical practice would only be able to put forth its own consistent and
powerful forms of creation (and self-creation!) through the same solution that
some avant-garde movements adopted when they reached the same crossroads: a
critique trapped within its own field. What they did was to look to other times, places and forms of the valorisation
of artistic labour apart from or as well as those that involved a
relationship with the institutional apparatus. In terms of my own experience, I
think this didn’t start to take place until the nineties, when the possibility
arose for the self-valorisation of artistic labour linked to new forms of protest and new social autonomy dynamics. I
believe that this is behind the enormous importance of the new collaborative
experiences of what where originally (mostly) artists groups such as La
Fiambrera in Spain, Ne pas plier in France, Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and
Etcétera in Argentina, and probably many others that have either faded, or were
less consistent, or we have yet to discover: they reinvented a way of valorising artistic labour, at a time when art
practice was already clearly paradigmatic of post-Fordist production overall.
They brought it out of its state of subjection (even if it was a critical
subjection) to flexible exploitation, and allowed this self-valorisation to
help strengthen the new social opposition dynamics that had emerged precisely
from the post-Fordist neoliberal hegemony.

This way of breaking out of the circle in which critical practices were
imprisoned certainly didn’t “solve” all the problems involved in the ways in
which critical work in the arts is subject to the institution – a complex
relationship that includes aspects ranging from the symbolic to the economic.
But it did favour conditions that allowed it to come to light and be approached
from other material and political positions.

This condensed account seems to culminate in the idea that it would,
therefore, be necessary to take this dynamic to the limit and bring about a
pure and simple escape from the art
institution or to relate to it from the
outside in a merely cynical or instrumental way. I’ve never considered this
to be the only possible conclusion; in fact, it doesn’t seem to me to be
necessarily a productive political
position. For many reasons. One of these reasons is patently obvious: the
production of artistic or cultural artefacts is not equivalent to the production of cars or weapons. The results of
our kind of production have a complex function in semiotic capitalism.
Regardless of the attractiveness of the post-situationist perspective, there is
no rule stating that cultural artefacts are not, or cannot be, anything other
than (or as well as) goods or tools for the ideological control of consciousness.
In empirical terms, it's not sustainable for all “forms” of labour in the
industry of the spectacle to be objectified, and I can’t stand the hypothesis
of the system’s omnipotent capacity to recuperate or co-opt. I’m not saying I
believe in the intrinsic goodness of culture or its essential legitimacy as a
means of emancipation! But in the face of so much (both cynical and erudite)
scepticism within our institutional
field, I have no choice but to declare myself a believer (that is, of
liberation theology!) in the potential of
critical labour within art, cultural and educational institutions – not only to
enlighten some mindsbut, above all, to influence the established modes of the
production of knowledge and subjectivation.
Nevertheless, I think that the operations carried out within the institutional
field should seek to go beyond it,
and above all valorise that which is
produced, at least partly outside of it. To me, this is not just a political
necessity but more importantly one of life’s lessons. Because in this way, many
of us found a way to break out of the desperate circle of critical theories
that seems unable to do anything other than wait to be recuperated for the
umpteenth time.

Whether a particular critical theory is recuperated or not isn’t as
important as what it was able to generate in
addition to being put into practice. What counts is the direction in which
your work contributes to mobilising individual and collective energies, which
it can do in many diverse ways and on a bigger or smaller scale. I don't think
declaring each of us an “accomplice” to a situation leads anywhere, except to
widespread cynicism. Likewise, it disturbs me to hear people whose work I
admire state that “we’re all on the inside”, “we're all institution” or “we're
all prostitutes” in the arts and leave it at that. These declarations are not
only inaccurate, they also stop short, and I think that they provoke the
responsibility to immediately respond: Then, what’s to be done?

But to understand the extent to which we are obviously dealing with
difficult and problematic dynamics, we don’t have to look any further than Desacuerdos (http://www.desacuerdos.org). In terms of what I am
proposing here, I see Desacuerdos as
a clear example of how extremely difficult it is to negotiate the simultaneity
of different times and forms of evaluating art labour, especially when most of
the labour comes from the outside or fringes of the field. That may have been
the principal failure of those of us who were involved in co-ordination in
different ways and with varying responsibilities: to have made it impossible
for there to be compatibility, at the
core of the project and in a complex way, between the different dynamics
and interests in relation to valorising the work put into it. It was important
to try, and we can only hope there will be many more attempts. And I don’t
think that this negates the project’s other, equally important accomplishments
(you only have to look at the publications edited). But the fact that this
particular failure took place amongst individuals and institutions that had
spent a long time fighting in favour of precisely those kinds of principles,
makes us take a much more cautious approach and exercise a greater degree of
reflection and modesty. I think that the outcome of Desacuerdos inevitably demands that we consider the problems of
scale, rhythms, the division of labour and the way decision-making processes
are managed in critical production projects linked to institutions. In addition
(to continue with the question of the relationship between criticism, art
practice and art institutions), I think it demonstrates the need to turn the
cliché that “behind the institutions, in the end, are the people” upside down.
Because in the end, there in the background, behind the people, are the
institutions (that through inertia have many different ways of applying the
microphysics of power), and all the other power relationships that play a part
in the arts, outside of the institutions. In theory, this isn’t a problem.
Foucault would insist that his critique of institutions should not have a
paralysing effect, and that it didn't refer to an idea of essential freedom, because attempts at constructing freedom and the
enjoyment of freedom itself could only take place inside given power relations. I think that the kinds of
contradictory and complex ways of proceeding that I am dealing with here (and
which I certainly don’t claim will exclude others!) are essential in today’s
world, with all its difficulties. But I also think that future attempts through
trial and error, conflict and negotiation, will need more politics, not better
intentions.